Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup has been FIFA’s ticket-pricing strategy. Fans have complained about exorbitant prices, opaque inventory releases, and a resale system that seems designed to extract every possible dollar from their love for the beautiful game.
But amid all these shenanigans, the secondary market is producing something valuable: information. Resale prices reveal what soccer fans, both domestic and foreign, are most excited to see—or at least, what sellers believe fans desire most intensely.
The obvious approach would be simply to compare the average ticket price for games involving different teams. But that would be misleading in such a geographically wide-ranging event. Argentina may command high prices partly because it plays in attractive locations. A match in Miami may be expensive partly because it features a popular team.
To separate those effects, we analyzed the lowest single-ticket resale prices for all 72 group-stage matches, estimating the independent contribution of each team and each host city. We used pretournament prices to ensure that underlying preferences, not the results of games played so far, drive the results. And we used secondary market prices from StubHub to get at market forces instead of FIFA’s demand estimates.
Our results provide a revealing snapshot of the loyalties and demographics of the North American soccer audience.
First and foremost, the home crowds are excited about watching their own teams play. After accounting for opponents and match locations, Mexico adds an estimated $623 to the resale price of the cheapest ticket, the United States adds $571, and Canada adds $231. That is an impressive host-country premium for three teams with relatively unexceptional records in recent international competition. Looking at prices 10 days into the tournament, the national squads’ successes so far have only raised these premiums.
Some of this is simple patriotism. A World Cup on home soil is rare, and supporters who might not ordinarily travel abroad to watch their national team suddenly have the chance to attend. Mexico also benefits from an enormous supporter base on both sides of the border. For millions of Mexican Americans, this tournament is simultaneously a home World Cup and a chance to see the team of their family’s heritage.
The other two major attractions are not countries but aging superstars. Lionel Messi, who will turn 39 during the tournament, and 41-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo remain the sport’s undisputed box-office attractions, though that may be less true for Ronaldo now than it was before the tournament started. Their teams, Argentina and Portugal, raised the estimated ticket prices by $312 and $442 respectively.
Demand for their games is in a different dimension from demand for matches featuring younger star players such as Spain’s Lamine Yamal, France’s Kylian Mbappé, or Norway’s Erling Haaland. The contrast with the last men’s World Cup hosted by the United States is striking. In 1994, Italy’s Roberto Baggio and Brazil’s Romário were 27 and 28. Even Diego Maradona, who was rapidly approaching the end of his playing career, was only 33. This time, the two greatest attractions are players whose careers began before many of the fans watching them were even born.
Part of the explanation is that Messi and Ronaldo are not merely great players. They became global celebrities during an era in which televised soccer, social media, and individual branding transformed the reach of the sport. For many supporters, the chance to see either player in person is a final opportunity to witness a piece of history.
Brazil, meanwhile, retains its extraordinary appeal even without a single comparable global icon—with apologies to Vinícius Júnior and Neymar, though the latter, as expected, missed Brazil’s first two games—and a lackluster record in recent tournaments. A Brazil match added an estimated $299 to the lowest resale price, putting the five-time men’s champion alongside Argentina and well ahead of most traditional European powers. The Canarinho (the Brazilian yellow jersey); the near-mythological appeal of the Seleção, as the team is known; and the expectation of flamboyant attacking soccer—now perhaps likely to bring slight disappointment—still carry enormous weight.
The strength of demand for Latin American teams also reflects the populations of the host countries. The United States and Canada contain large communities with roots in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. For many families, supporting Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, or another Latin American country is an inherited identity rather than a temporary preference.
That helps explain why the tournament’s ticket market does not simply reproduce the current FIFA rankings. Prices mostly reflect the number and intensity of a team’s supporters within traveling distance of the stadium. The relative weakness of the traditional European powers in the resale market is particularly revealing.
England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands all have estimated team effects below zero in our analysis. That does not mean that their games will be empty or that their supporters do not care. It suggests that, once we account for opponents and locations, these teams are not generating the resale premium that one might expect from their soccer pedigrees.
One interpretation is that European fans are sitting this World Cup out. Even leaving aside possible fears related to border and immigration enforcement or antipathy toward the U.S. administration, traveling across the Atlantic; moving between widely dispersed host cities; and paying for accommodation, on top of already expensive tickets, makes attendance exceptionally costly. A supporter in Germany or England can ordinarily reach all the European Championship matches—or the next World Cup in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal—with a short flight or train journey. A tournament spread across North America presents a fundamentally different proposition.
Nor do European teams benefit from comparably large expatriate communities in the United States. There are, of course, many Americans with German, English, or Dutch ancestry, but those identities rarely translate into the same intense support for the ancestral national team that is common among more recent immigrant communities.
Location matters almost as much as the teams themselves. Miami has, by far, the largest estimated city premium, adding more than $1,000, on average, to the lowest resale price relative to Kansas City. Guadalajara and Mexico City follow, with premiums above $800, while New York and New Jersey add more than $500.
Our estimation results make intuitive sense. Miami is both an international destination and a major center of Latin American life in the United States. New York offers a vast local population, extensive international connections, and large immigrant communities. Mexico’s host cities combine intense local demand with the appeal of attending a World Cup match among one of the world’s great soccer cultures.
At the other end of the spectrum, the West Coast market is surprisingly weak. San Francisco has an estimated city effect of minus $346, while Vancouver, Seattle, and Los Angeles also trail the leading cities.
This does not necessarily mean that West Coast residents are less interested in soccer. Geography may be the more important explanation. For supporters arriving from Europe or much of Latin America, East Coast and Mexican venues are generally easier to reach. The enormous distances within North America also make it difficult for fans to follow their teams from city to city. A tournament that is nominally hosted by three countries is, in practice, spread across an entire continent.
These estimates come with uncertainty. Resale listings are not completed transactions, resales are more common and less restricted in the United States than in Canada and Mexico, and sellers may be guessing incorrectly about future demand. Prices will move as teams advance, stars get injured, and FIFA releases additional inventory. But even asking prices are informative because they represent collective bets about what hundreds of thousands of fans are willing to pay.
One silver lining of FIFA’s controversial ticketing strategy is that prices reveal what fans most want to see. They offer a map of North American soccer fandom shaped by national pride, immigration, and geography. Fans in host countries are eager to support their teams; Latin American teams enjoy a substantial built-in audience; and Messi and Ronaldo, perhaps for the last time, still tower over the next generation.
